Tresata Hack

Inspiration

Charlotte is a vibrant city that has become a mecca for millennials. This has resulted in the construction of new housing and apartment complexes around the region. Although this represents a great opportunity for many Charlotte residents, this has also caused a decrease in the number of affordable housing units in the city. The theme for the Tresata Hackathon is to discover why affordable housing units in Charlotte has decreased and how they can increase.

What it does

The script extracts all houses currently available in Charlotte through Zillow's API. It works by passing the parameters associated with Zillow's documentation and will return back houses based on the parameters passed. The Script can be run locally using a bash terminal.

How we built it

By taking Machine Learning this semester, our group had experience with python programming. The script was written locally in a bash terminal. We pulled several python libraries needed for the script

Imports ->

• import requests
• import unicodecsv
• import argparse

Challenges we ran into

Working with the zillow API and running the script locally was challenging. We had to ensure the right libraries were downloaded and the parameters passed followed zillows documentation.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Working with other teams and delivering a script that can grab the most recent houses on the market in Charlotte. The script can also work with cities across The United States by passing zipcodes into the script.

What we learned

1) Working together as a team 2) Writing Python Scripts 3) Working with an external API 4) Working with developers in Charlotte

What's next for Tresata Hack

Tresata already plans to host a hackthon next year and will most likely change their theme. I am proud of our team and all the developers who contributed to the hackathons. Seeing people come together to come up with ideas to tackle affordable housing is what Charlotte needs.

Built With

• bash
• python
• zillow